You’d like to hope that your business will be one neverending success story and that you’ll forever be on an upward trajectory. Alas, this is far from guaranteed. Because your company will be influenced by so many external factors, and because you’re not perfect and will make mistakes, there’ll be times where you take a step backward. This doesn’t need to have an overly negative impact or derail your business, providing you get it back on track quickly. Below, we take a look at six things that can derail a business no matter how well things are going, if you’re not careful.
Taking On Too Much
You might think you want your business to get as many clients as possible. But you don’t. You want to get as many customers as you can serve well. If you’re only a small business, then having a thousand customers knocking at your door isn’t an image of corporate heaven; it’s corporate hell. It’s vitally important that you understand how much work your business can handle before it becomes overbearing. It is much, much better to turn down work rather than accept it and realize you can only provide a subpar job.
A Poor Team
You’re only one player on your team, albeit the leader and most important member. When it comes to the success of your company, it’ll be the team that you assemble that has the biggest impact on your success. As such, it’s crucial that you learn how to hire correctly. You need to be looking beyond the resume, and instead, work out how they fit in with your overall corporate identity and mission. It is possible to have a superstar employee who is completely wrong for your company. Learn how to hire the right employee!
Going Off Track
You might be in the business of, say, selling shoes or legal services, but that’s not what your company is. Your company is your branding. That’ll be the vehicle that keeps your company moving forward even when the types of shoes you sell or legal services you provide fall out of favor. Essentially, your business is bigger than whatever it “does,” which is almost incidental. As such, it’s important that you use corporate branding and brand compliance software to ensure that all of your internal and external documents are compliant with your brand. The aim is to create a seamless, robust corporate brand, and you can’t do that there’s no cohesion between what you’re showcasing to the world.
No Customer Retention Practices
It’s good to get a customer, but it’s much, much better to keep a customer. The cost of keeping a customer on the hook is a lot cheaper than the cost of bringing a new customer on board, so it’s important that you take steps to retain your customers once they’ve used your service once. You can do this by following up with them after their purchase to ensure they were fully satisfied with the transaction, and also sending them promotional emails with customer-only deals.
Social Media Mistakes
Social media is a powerful tool for companies. And like all powerful tools, it’s one that can easily go wrong if it’s not managed properly. While it’s fine to push the boat out every now and again to test the water, it’s crucial to keep in mind that social media errors have caused big problems for companies in the past. The general rule is that you should avoid posting anything controversial, and also keep any angry tweets or posts to yourself (unless you’re sure you can express that anger in a hilarious way; some companies have actually benefited from this in the past!).
Not Planning For the Future
The world isn’t static. What works today will not necessarily work in the future, purely because the world is forever in flux, and what’s popular today can be yesterday’s news tomorrow. While there’s no way to guarantee that your business is going to be as successful further on down the line as it is today, you can increase your chances by keeping one eye on the future and making small adjustments to your business based on what’s coming up ahead. There’s no way to know for sure, but if you don’t look ahead, then you can be sure that the future will be a surprise!
Keep on doing your thing and pushing your ideas forward, but always keep in mind the issues that we’ve outlined above on ways to derail a business —if only because they’ve been responsible for setbacks to other companies before!
